Careening toward a strongman

The Western world may be careening with break-neck speed towards a strongman.From Europe to the United States, the common citizen has found himself confronted with problems that shouldn't be and people who shouldn't be here. The pleas of the legal voting and taxpaying citizen have been ignored, and elected officials throw their hands in the air and proclaim, "There's nothing we can do." Even if they don't say it, they act like it.

From France to Germany to England to Sweden to the United States and beyond, non-citizens are ushered in by the thousands. They are granted special privileges while the locals are told to buck up and take it. If criminality soars, it is merely the price of being a good person. If taxes go up to accommodate the non-citizen, the legal resident is directed to fork out more and smile. If your child is raped and murdered by someone that shouldn't have been here in the first place, it is the rapist and murderer who the media and government appear to support. Accordingly, the feeling the government as a whole is on the side of the perpetrators grows, and the gap between the citizen and the officials he funds moves toward unbridgeable.

Beneath the surface, a broiling discontent is building. Like a volcano, at some point it will erupt with a devastating force. It will cause harm to the just and unjust alike. Such eruptions are rarely discriminatory in who they wipe out. Everyone suffers.

Who would be to blame? The answer in the United States is clear; it would be our government. If a strongman were to surface with both the desire and authority to get the situation under control, it is likely he would be welcomed. Such is the risk catastrophic failure of governance in the West has created.

What portion of the society would lament the return of safe city streets; off a sensible immigration policy governed by rules applicable to all; to taxpayer dollars being spent on the needs of the actual tax payers; to an education system that educates instead of indoctrinates; to a robust job market; to the restoration of national manufacturing capability to ensure jobs and an ability to expand into making war materials should the nation come under threat from a foreign entity; to the ridding of the United States of the United Nations; to a sensible foreign policy based on strength and support to those nations who support America and believe in its overall goodness? Who wouldn't support reining in three-letter agencies who have shown an interest in prosecuting fellow citizens for holding unapproved political positions? In Europe, who amongst the populace there would not support a return to order; to security and sanity with regard to their city streets, country villages, and classic world-class cities?

A leader with the authority to brush aside the leftist naysayers and their equity piffle would be welcomed, and—worse yet—may be required. Clearly, whatever the West is doing now is not working. How far gone do we have to be to recognize we're on the pathway to the destruction of liberty, values, art, sensibility, and freedom—all through the acquiescence to the dystopian dreams of the left? I wager most citizens of the West do not support a state of affairs that makes their daily life more strenuous, dangerous, and brutal.

Wise men warned we may give up too much in the name of security, but it is equally disastrous that we could be mandated to give up even more in an effort to achieve a leftist Utopian vision resulting, as usual, in nothing more than shared poverty and misery.

Who can fix it? A strongman. A leader given free rein for several years to make the countries of the West safe to live in again; a leader who draws a firm line in the sand and expels those who hate our values and traditions; a leader who regains control of immigration and returns it to lawfulness; a leader who restores order; a leader who makes life predictable for the citizens; a leader who ends the citizen's worry about what an over-centralized and distant government might do to him from year to year to year.

I am not advocating for such a strongman; merely noting the obvious. We in the West have so catastrophically failed in self-governance that our elected representatives are considered buffoons and milquetoast boobs seeking only to enrich themselves while doing nothing whatsoever about the troubles the citizen has to navigate daily. In Germany, France, the UK, and others, the small and formerly peaceful villages are overrun by gangs and violent immigrant thugs. The government shrugs. In the United States, the gates to our borders are flung wide open. The government shrugs, and some cities and state governments set up special protections and sanctuaries for the very group of invaders from whence assassins and rapists come. If you disregard the concerns of your own legal populace long enough, you should not be surprised when citizens give their support to a man (or woman) who—if sufficiently empowered—ends the insanity. In short, the West will have deserved it.

It depends on the answer to this question: "How far gone are we?" Honestly consider the state of the West today and think about what is required to right the ship. "How far gone are?"

Indeed.

Tracy Sharp is Chairman of the Lake County Republican Central Committee.